Familiar Demon

by Amy Lane

  Edward nodded and bent for a moment, touching Mullins’s still cheek. “Hold on, beloved. Trust me.”

  “Are you ready?” Suriel asked. “Because on your count, we’ll blood the hex bags, and after that, Cory’s going to work her magic. Give us the signal, Edward—we need this done now!”

  Edward didn’t ask about Harry—he could only hope.

  “Ready, my lady?” he called to the darkness, standing as strongly as he could.

  “Ready, Edward!”

  He looked up, mouth open. She was… flying. Directly overhead, Bracken and Arturo at her side. The wind whipped through their hair, and she held her hands out toward the circle of vampires hovering in the air outside the circle of people on the ground. Edward gasped and tried to pull his attention to his job instead of the spectacle above.

  “As soon as the hex bags are blooded—you’ll see the glow. That’s when we need you.”

  “You hear that, guys?” she called, and the vampires all called back various versions of “Got it!”

  “All right! Everyone in the circle turn around and face me, then blood your hex bags. Go!”

  He felt it.

  He’d laid the chalk for these three pentagrams, and he felt the power—the combined power—of everybody giving their life force to Mullins’s transformation. It flooded him, overwhelming, like a spotlight through a bedroom window or an ocean through a spigot.

  Their circle became a glowing orb, half of it buried below his feet in the earth of this holy place and the other half arching overhead in a golden bowl of light, and Edward remembered the words of the spell and opened his mouth to chant.

  As he spoke, he looked above and then shut his eyes so he could think.

  The Lady Cory was pouring power into the vampires above, and they in turn were glowing blue, their very light destroying every demon who came through the air around the hill. In that moment that he looked, he could see the flicker of lights and the carnage of the demon dead, a chaos of battle and the hellish joy of the vampires as they threw cold fire from their hands and killed and killed again.

  The chant ended, but the spell was not yet closed, and Edward knew the thing he had to do next.

  Of this, and this alone, he was not afraid.

  Mullins, there are people fighting all around us and demons destroying themselves to do us harm. And I regret their pain, and I regret this chaos, but my beloved, nothing in this world or beyond this world can make me regret loving you. You were the dry, funny voice in my head as I truly grew and came of age. You were the avenging angel when my blood or that of my brothers was spilled. And in the past years, you have become my true companion, the other beat of my heart, the better part of my judgment, the sureness of my convictions. I would start this quest again and again and again for just one more day at your side. If the most we can manage is one night every hundred years, then I will be there, ready to love you, my love as fresh as summer rain to wash away our sins and our fears and make us clean for one more touch.

  Come back to me. Be my beloved. I give you a legion of brothers and friends, new family of the heart for our betrothal, if only you’ll be mine.

  Several things happened at once.

  The spell closed, that tremendous power shutting off, leaving Edward staggering from the effort of channeling it into Mullins.

  The people in the circle all gave a little gasp, as though they’d been pricked by a needle, and several of them stumbled to their knees. The werecreatures all became abruptly human, shivering and pissed off and naked.

  The demons in the ring of battle simply disappeared, the destroyed bodies fizzling into the air in a noxious vapor.

  Cory cut off her flow of power abruptly, and her vampires fell randomly out of the sky, many of them laughing drunkenly as they landed, lying on their backs and belching softly as Cory, Bracken, and Arturo descended slowly, landing very carefully not on any fizzling demon corpses.

  Francis, Beltane, and Suriel stepped into the circle, looking at Edward hopefully as Edward turned and found Mullins on the green. He crouched, heedless of the pain in his ribs, to see Mullins open his eyes.

  “Beloved?” he asked, because it was, once again, the Mullins he’d made love to, the beautiful man with the lake blue eyes who loved him back. He was sitting up groggily, looking surprised.

  “We got out of hell, then?” he asked, and Edward fell to his knees and laughed a little.

  “We did indeed,” he said, touching Mullins’s face. “Did we manage to lose your tail this time?”

  Mullins thought carefully—

  And turned into a small gray housecat.

  And then turned back, looking surprised.

  Edward kissed him on his befuddled nose and then took his mouth, shoulders shaking with suppressed tears.

  Mullins pulled back and whispered, “That was marvelous. I’ll have to do it again sometime on purpose.”

  Edward nodded and looked up at the circle of brothers around them. “Did you see that?” he asked. “Sorry, Beltane. We were hoping for a dog.”

  “No worries,” Bel said happily, offering them a both hand up. “I’m just happy for a brother.”

  And then they were surrounded, their brothers embracing them soundly, laughing with joy.

  Except for one.

  Edward pulled away from the rejoicing, worried beyond belief. “Harry?” he asked anxiously, only a little relieved when Green left the shadows of the nearest tree to come toward them, Harry in his arms.

  “Exhausted,” Green said tenderly, kissing a sleeping Harry on the forehead. “I’m afraid I was much out of the battle this time, so I could feed him strength. But he’ll make it.” He grimaced. “But I think it’s best if you boys honeymoon here, just to give him time to recover. Do you mind?”

  Edward shook his head, eyes burning, and pulled Mullins into his arms before grimacing. He took a deep breath and stopped, coughing. “Dammit,” he muttered. “Mullins, I think you cracked my ribs.”

  “Doing what?” Mullins asked, still out of it, and Edward would have laughed, but his ribs hurt too much to breathe.

  “Oh, dear boy!” Green cried, concerned. “Suriel, my lad, come here and take your lover. I think Edward needs a little help!”

  Green helped him sink to the ground, laying hands on his ribs while the rest of Green’s people… cleaned up.

  Legions of tiny fey came out with equally tiny buckets of water which they poured over the remains of the demons, rinsing those areas clean.

  The elves tended to the shapeshifters, healing them of their hurts in small multihued explosions of light, and when that was over, the shapeshifters wandered to the lawn and started to drag the vampires back inside.

  “I don’t wanna go,” belched a tall one with a black widow’s peak who looked astoundingly like Dracula, while draped half over a short, bandy-legged werewolf’s shoulders.

  “That’s cute. I’ll throw your boyfriend in with you, will that make it easier?” Teague—the werewolf—asked, naked and bleeding, while an elf tried to grab his arm. “Lambent, the bloody hell!”

  “You’re bleeding, wolfman. Yes, I know, you’re fucking badass and all that shite, but for sweet fuck’s sake can’t I just close this fucking wound before you drag that idiot inside?”

  “Yeah. Fine. Whatever.”

  “Your graciousness overwhelms me. Now stop moving.”

  At that point Green put his hands on Edward’s shoulders, and a soothing, peaceful surcease of pain practically melted him into the ground, made even better by Mullins sitting, warm and real, at his side.

  At that moment, Lady Cory’s voice penetrated his haze. “Are you shitting me?” she asked, and the man Edward had last seen in a police uniform nodded earnestly. He was naked now, which made Edward wonder which shapeshifter he’d been.

  “Serious,” he said. “I swear to Goddess, Cory. We’re all fine.”

  Cory closed her eyes and bounced on her toes. “Did you hear that?” she shouted to the world in gene
ral. “People, that’s zero casualties! Zero fucking casualties! And I just might get inside in time to kiss my children before they sleep!”

  The whoop that went up from the people on the hill was deafening, and Edward found his eyes closing, even as he sat on the lawn.

  “You remember, Francis?” he asked, hoping his brother was right there. “After Leonard was turned. Emma and Leonard walked back to town with us in their arms and found us a place to sleep and some mice to eat.”

  “Harry found the mice,” Francis said, yawning and collapsing abruptly by Edward’s feet.

  “Yeah, but they did all that, and I’m so tired I can hardly move.”

  “That’s because I’m spelling you all to sleep,” Green said with a weary laugh. “I don’t trust the lot of you not to start another war if you don’t get a nap in first.”

  “Mullins?” Edward mumbled, slumping to the ground.

  “Right here,” Mullins mumbled back. “Never leaving you. Never.”

  “Never’s not good enough,” Edward whispered, but then he fell asleep, so it would have to do.

  After the Hard Rain

  EDWARD AWOKE in a room full of sunshine, Mullins asleep next to him, curled on his side, facing away.

  Edward reached out an arm and pulled him closer, full length of naked man flush backward against Edward’s front.

  A quiet chuckle rumbled in his chest.

  “What?” Mullins asked hazily.

  “No tail.” Just a bare and slightly furry backside. Edward could rub it all day.

  But as Mullins moaned deliciously and thrust against Edward’s hand, he thought maybe he had better things to do than rub his lover’s bottom.

  He kissed the back of Mullins’s neck, scraping lightly with his teeth, and Mullins breathed out sharply through his nose.

  “Have I ever told you how much I like that?” he asked.

  Edward leaned over and nuzzled his ear. “How about that?”

  “Mm… that too.”

  Edward reached around and brushed a tan nipple with his thumb. “That too?”

  “Mmm… yes….”

  “This could be my favorite game ever,” Edward whispered, rolling his hips so Mullins could feel his erection pushing thickly against his backside.

  “Can we play the short version this time?” Mullins asked breathily. “Suddenly I need you very much.”

  Edward moved his reaching hand down Mullins’s stomach, not surprised in the least to find his cock hard and thick in his palm.

  He squeezed and stroked, liking the way Mullins arched his hips very much.

  “You need me?” he whispered.

  “Inside me,” Mullins begged. He reached across the bed for a tiny plastic bottle sitting on the end table in plain sight. As he handed it off to Edward, Edward couldn’t help but ask.

  “That was just there?”

  “There were two cups of water too,” Mullins moaned. “I drank one in the middle of the night.”

  Edward remembered that too. Simple human things, both of them drinking water, getting up to pee, stumbling in the dark.

  Coming back to bed and cuddling together and falling asleep.

  “Yes, but….” Edward couldn’t finish the thought as he slicked up his own cock and then probed between Mullins’s cleft.

  “Ahh….” Mullins thrust back against his fingers, and Edward shuddered. So perfect, so easy. Life wouldn’t always give them each other, perfect and easy. This moment was something they’d worked for, had earned.

  It was so much sweeter for all of that.

  They could savor this moment and remember to always come back to it.

  Mullins shifted his hips and pulled his knee up to his chest, giving Edward access, and there, ah! So tight. So warm. The haven his body had always needed.

  Edward pushed inside him slowly, letting Mullins’s noises be his guide.

  His head popped through, leaving Mullins to clamp down on his shaft as Edward slid all the way in with a delirious “Yesss!”

  Oh yes.

  He fucked.

  Such an animal thing—hips forward, hips backward, cock forward, cock backward—skin and nerves and electrical stimuli….

  And trust.

  And joy.

  And physical exultation.

  And love.

  Oh, so very much love.

  Forward and backward, he built momentum, their bodies pulsing in waves of pleasure, high pitches of sensation.

  Mullins groaned, hand moving to his own cock, and then, the best thing of all, he begged some more. “Faster, Edward. Harder. All. I need it all.”

  With a growl Edward shoved against his shoulder blade, pushing him flat and facedown against the bed while he fucked him furiously, the pressure of pleasure building up in his loins until he was desperate for release.

  “Augh!” he cried out. “No! Too soon—”

  “Now!” Mullins demanded. “Now! I need… oh yes! Oh God yes! Please!”

  Edward could deny him nothing. He howled, his arms shaking as his climax rocked him, shattered him, and he poured himself into his lover’s body, sweating and panting and joyous.

  Mullins convulsed around him, milking him flaccid, pulling his seed inside, keeping all of him safe.

  Edward collapsed on top of him, facedown on the bed, and licked the back of his neck.

  “Didn’t we just do this?” Mullins mumbled.

  “But it ended up so well the first time,” Edward said, and they were still connected when Mullins laughed, so it reverberated through his entire body.

  The feeling was delicious.

  “I’d like to kiss you now,” Mullins told him, and Edward lowered his face to where Mullins had turned his head.

  “I’d like to kiss you forever,” he whispered.

  “That too.”

  But they started with now.

  EVENTUALLY THEY made it out of bed in what appeared to be a suite. The floor and walls were paneled in glowing golden oak, and the coverlet—a detailed quilt, they realized as they looked at it—was all lake blue. They had a window that looked out over the hill and across the highway, to the canyon beyond.

  Their windows were opened, and forest green curtains billowed into their room in the early morning breeze.

  “It should be colder,” Mullins said as they made their way out of a deliciously prolonged shower. He was bare, with a towel wrapped around his waist as he hunted for sweats in a set of drawers that looked hand-carved to match the bedframe.

  “I think Green controls the temperature,” Edward told him, biting his lip. He could go again. He could. They’d had sex waking up and sex in the shower, and he could have gone one more time if Mullins hadn’t begged for food to sustain him.

  Half laughing, yes, but also serious.

  Edward knew it was the first of many meals to come.

  “He can do that?” Mullins pulled out what looked to be a clean pair of comfortably worn sweats and a long-sleeved T-shirt in a man’s medium. He threw them at Edward—with boxer shorts to match—and grabbed a set for himself.

  “He apparently shopped for us,” Edward said dryly, sliding the clothes on.

  “These could fit half the men here,” Mullins told him. “It’s like we got the shared laundry pile Emma used to use for you three.”

  Edward grinned and bounced his bottom on the bed. “Now us six,” he said, overwhelmed with the joy of having them all—brothers and lover and parents—all in one heart.

  “Four,” Mullins corrected, pulling on his bottoms. “Suriel and Beltane need totally different sizes.”

  Edward laughed. “So you, my demon lover, are really the most average man of us all!”

  Mullins finished dressing and walked into the vee of Edward’s legs. “Not too average, I hope,” he said softly, closing his eyes and lowering his mouth for a kiss.

  “Perfect,” Edward said against his lips. “Absolutely perfect.”

  Mullins sank into the kiss, and Edward was about to let his good in
tentions about finding breakfast fly out the window when there was a knock on the door.

  “Guys? You got breakfast arriving.” At Cory’s words, a tray of everything—toast, fruit, eggs, sausage, everything—appeared on the dresser they’d just used, and Mullins moaned in gratitude as he moved toward the food. “And I hope you’re decent because I’ve got to come in.”

  “All dressed, Lady,” Edward said. He couldn’t begrudge their hostess a damned thing—not after everything her people had done for them.

  “Excellent.” Cory came through the door dressed… well, much the way Mullins and Edward were. The men’s sweats were snug across her hips, and the enormous white T-shirt—likely one of Bracken’s or Green’s—hung down to her knees. Her hair was pulled up in a practical ponytail behind her head, and she carried the little girl—white-blonde of hair and silver-blue of eye—on her hip. “Can you say hello, Silver?”

  The child hid her face against Cory’s neck, and she kissed the top of a perfectly braided blond coif.

  Apparently the sprites did more than just cook.

  “Too shy,” Cory apologized, smiling. “So, guys—come out when you’re ready. They’ll drop food in on you and clean up if you don’t, and get mad at me if you don’t eat, so definitely eat. We have snacks out in the kitchen if you get hungry between times—make yourself at home. Green wants to meet with you this evening, and we’re going to have a celebratory feast tomorrow. You may want to invite your mother, Edward, because that’s the other thing.” A buzzing filled the room, and Cory grimaced, pulling Edward’s phone out of the pocket of her sweats. “Your mother’s been calling. She wants an update. She seems to think we’ve cooked you and served you up as scraps. Francis and Beltane don’t count—and Suriel got us about an hour’s reprieve. She needs to talk to you.”

  Edward frowned. “What about Harry?”

  Cory sobered. “Still sleeping. He’ll be okay, but Suriel and Green both thought they should let him stay that way. So there you go. You have a banquet in your honor tomorrow, and your only chore today is to call your mother. You’re welcome.”